Hybrid Cars: The Standard For the Future

A hybrid car: what is it was and how is it comparable to a conventional vehicle. Sure, they’re better for the environment, but if I wanted to research it right, I would have to learn the nuts and bolts of it.

What is a hybrid car, exactly? How does it work? Is the mileage better? Is there less maintenance? A hybrid car uses a standard fuel engine, which creates electric power through a generator. The goal is a more eco-friendly transport, with lower emissions. Hybrids cars utilize both the engine and the generator’s store of electric power to increase cleaner efficiency. The car runs on electricity at slower speeds and the engine kicks in around 55 mph extending the vehicle’s range. Every year, more cities plan for plug-in sites for the increasing hybrid market. This will be especially important, as fuel cell cars that chemically bind hydrogen and oxygen to create water for hydro electric become more mainstream.

At safe highway speeds, a hybrid vehicle is just as efficient as most standard vehicles. In terms of maintenance, as the number of automotive shops with qualified technicians increases, the overall costs of upkeep, parts, and accessories will drop. Many manufacturers, looking to capture the global-conscious millennial market, see the benefit of phasing in alternate-energy cars, trucks, and sport utility vehicles. This looks like a realistic goal, which will see a majority of hybrid-type vehicles on the road within the next twenty years. Switching the engine makeup increasingly to cleaner electric energy will create a new renaissance in an otherwise flat market.

Engineers have been working for the last couple of decades on other types of alternate, clean energy for next-generation hybrids. The Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy within the U.S. Department of Energy is working with their development teams to create cars and trucks with zero-emissions, including for mass-transit. Ethanol/gasoline fuel blends help in the interim to reduce pollutants into the atmosphere, burning cleaner and producing fewer by-products and total petroleum waste. The engine that runs on used vegetable oil is also another not-quite-completely-forgotten option, the multitasker of viable alternatives as we increasingly have to deal with ways to process the millions of tons of excess waste our populations create each year.

It is a step in the right direction, as hybrids become a sound environmental and increasingly financial choice. May it be too much of a dream that one day we might be able to use the wind generated by these vehicles on our highways, collected into generators we will build into bridges and overpasses, to create usable wind-generated electric power? Will someday we be able to take sound, compress it, and in a way amplify it to create power to run hybrids of the future? Who knows for certain; however, in the automotive world we have seen innovation time and again, and there may be ideas that no man thought possible in our day and age.